


Bibliophiles

by matrixrefugee



Category: Gormenghast (TV), Gormenghast Trilogy - Mervyn Peake
Genre: F/M, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-19
Updated: 2018-05-19
Packaged: 2019-05-08 22:10:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 765
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14703450
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/matrixrefugee/pseuds/matrixrefugee
Summary: Lord Sepulchrave finds some unexpected companionship in the library





	Bibliophiles

**Author's Note:**

> One Gormenghast fic I've been wanting to write for a long time has been a story about Steerpike's mother (in the BBC miniseries version of the canon, though I wouldn't be above grandfathering it into book canon, since SP always gave me vibes that he was more than he seemed) came to meet Lord Sepulchrave...

She called herself Crestshell Slingsby, this pale wisp of a woman with eyes like bits of smoke darkened emeralds in a face that looked as though someone had molded it from the white dust that covered the cobblestones in the quadrangle behind the Library. And where had she worked before she had approached the Library? Sepulchrave had asked. She replied that she had recently left the laundry room, with its steam and starch, no place for a woman who had kept a small book hidden in her work apron. She had started to learn to read with the help of Mister Michaelmas, the Poet, when she had brought him his clean sheets and shirts, when she was barely strong enough to carry them through the long hallways of the East Wing.

Would not the books be heavy for her small frame and hands? the Earl feared, looking at her with concern.

Not at all: compared to laundry sacks, even the heaviest tomes were like feathers, she reassured the Earl.

She was perfect as a librarian: she had a clever way of turning phrases as she spoke, and she read with an appetite: eager, but delicate, free of any voraciousness that lead one to read without absorbing. She savored the print and handwriting which passed before her. She would do nicely as his assistant.

Her duties would keep her cooped up among the stacks that lined the walls of the Library, covering some of the windows and filling the floor. Her slender build allowed her to glide between the shelves with ease, and she accepted her cloistering with pleasure: the daylight irritated her pale skin and so the prospect of staying out of the light put her at ease. By day she tended the volumes on the stacks, reverently dusting the shelves and the tomes to lengthen their longevity, and reorganizing them to fit the Earl's idea of order. By night, when his melancholy kept the Earl from sleeping, she would help him to select a proper text to ease his senses through the gates of horn and ivory. A volume of the poets would assure him of pleasant dreams, while the weighty prose of the philosophers would ensure that he would fall quickly to sleep, sometimes even in his own chair. On one occasion, he awakened in the pale hours of the morning, lying upon a couch, Miss Slingsby seated at the foot, keeping watch.

"How did I come here when I fell asleep in my chair?" he asked, looking from the couch to the chair, a distance of some twenty paces. 

"If it please you, my Lord, I carried you here," she replied.

"But that is not seemly, for a woman to do so," he objected.

"Begging your pardon, my Lord, but would it be seemly for the Earl of Gormenghast to fall asleep in his chair, a book on his chest and his mouth hanging slack?" she asked, with a smirk.

He could not object to that display of concern, but he would not have a repeat of it: instead of going down to the Library to read till he tired, he would send for Miss Slingsby to bring a fitting volume to his bedchamber. Given her age -- she had past her fortieth summer -- few saw anything improper in such an arrangement. Nor did anyone think otherwise when she lingered to read to him or to talk with him of books until all hours of the night. The Countess, his wife, was not given to the same scholarly pursuits as he, and he longed for a companion whose intellectual interests matched his own.

It happened in the spring, that she brought her Lord, at his request, a volume of sensual poetry, a book of which he, trembling, asked if she had ever done more than read of such things. She said she had, but not with one who had appreciated fine words to accompany the matter.

Their reading and the enactment thereof on several successive nights passed the notice of the footmen, but not of Mister Flay, who had heard suspicious noises while he slept outside his master's door. Soon enough, Sepulchrave would take Flay aside, bidding him discreetly spirit the woman into the West Wing and to have Doctor Hackingill keep watch over her during her confinement. The last that he wanted to do was to expose a woman of such clever intellect to his lady's ire or that of the Secretary of the Ritual: either one would offer no quarter for his issue, since it was not gotten of his wife...


End file.
